County Nurses Lay Out the Case for Firing Their Boss

This morning, eight Multnomah County corrections nurses hand-delivered a letter to county commissioners demanding the firing of their boss, Corrections Health director Myque Obiero.

It follows an overwhelming vote of “no confidence” by their union, which passed overwhelmingly in February with 97% of corrections nurses in support.

“We have attempted to engage with management in these meetings but have not seen improvements to our identified issues nor have we seen our desired outcomes to have been met,” reads the letter, which nurses handed to commissioners as they entered the meeting this morning.

The letter says Obiero lacks qualifications for the position and has failed to adequately staff the county’s jails, where seven inmates died last year. It also accuses Corrections Health leadership of “gross mismanagement” of the jails, citing the findings of a scathing National Institute of Corrections report released earlier this year.

In a statement, County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said she was “very concerned about these allegations” but that union representatives had so far declined to meet with her to discuss them. “We very much need [the union] to follow up and come to the table to meet with us so we can understand and address their concerns,” she said. A spokesperson for that union, the Oregon Nurses Association, says they tried to get the issue on the county agenda two weeks ago but were rebuffed.

County officials have previously said their staffing struggles stem from a shortage of qualified candidates. Nurses say the county is not doing enough to make the jobs appealing, citing low pay and increasing use of mandatory overtime.

Data shared with WW by ONA shows that the number of mandatory overtime shifts has not declined since the county promised to address the problem.

The letter cites a laundry list of grievances with Obiero, a former nurse who was promoted to lead Corrections Health in 2022. It says he “watched sports in his office daily” when working for the county as a program manager and lacked the required “seven years of qualifying experience” when he was promoted to director.

In that role, it says, he’s failed to help out his short-staffed employees, leaving for a month of vacation last summer at the height of the crisis. Since then, he has been “frequently absent” and “unreachable by phone during business hours,” the letter says.

The result is burnout, the letter says, and staff is fleeing. “As of March 2024, the most tenured psychiatric provider has been with [the division] for less than one year,” it says. Nurses, the letter notes, can get better paying jobs at local hospitals—where it’s usually illegal for administrators to require nurses to work mandatory overtime.

The letter demands the county health department replace Obiero and increase nurses’ pay to address the staff crisis.

The letter also names two other Corrections Health officials, a frequently absent nurse supervisor and a former jail administrator, who the letter says was “making clinical decisions without a clinical license.” That administrator, Rachael Lee, left the position in January to work for the Oregon Health Authority as a policy analyst.